GoKawiilThe deadly disease was identified half a century ago in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is unacceptable that it continues to take lives.
A community health worker next to a coffin of someone thought to have died from Ebola in Ituri province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Credit: Michel Lunanga/Getty
Half a century ago, researchers and policymakers joined together to identify an unknown disease and bring it under control. That first Ebola outbreak took 280 lives from 318 cases in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). After it was reported in September 1976, rapid action — an organized campaign of surveillance, contact tracing, isolating cases and safe burials — meant that the outbreak was over within four months1.
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Now, 50 years later, Central African countries are again in the middle of a serious outbreak, and one that was detected far too late. As Nature’s news team and others have reported (see Nature https://doi.org/q8r6; 2026), the virus responsible for the current outbreak, a rare species of Ebola virus called Bundibugyo, was probably circulating for months before any cases were reported. The very first case has still not been identified.
By the time World Health Organization (WHO) director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a public-health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on 17 May, there had been 8 laboratory-confirmed cases, 246 suspected cases and 80 suspected deaths. When this editorial was published, 228 people were suspected to have died from the disease in the DRC, and one in Uganda. There were more than 900 suspected cases in total and around 120 had been confirmed.
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In many ways, things have moved on since 1976. Then, virus samples needed to be sent to Europe and the United States for analysis, and rapid genome sequencing had not been invented. Now, countries affected by Ebola have much more home-grown scientific and medical infrastructure. And Africa has its own public-health agency, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Addis Ababa, which is taking the lead in coordinating the response to the current outbreak. Moreover, countries including Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda have better capacity for surveillance, testing, diagnosis and treatment. But the DRC does not. And of the 40 and counting Ebola outbreaks since 1976, this is where 17 have originated.
The WHO declaration of a PHEIC has unlocked a large international humanitarian effort — at an online meeting this week, US$500 million was pledged. And Springer Nature is among publishers making recent and relevant Ebola research freely available (see go.nature.com/4e5quov).
But the response must now also include a continent-wide effort to invest in public-health capacity, in the DRC, Uganda and another ten countries that Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa CDC, has said are at risk of an outbreak: Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia. That investment must include research into and development of treatments and vaccines — there aren’t yet any for Bundibugyo. It must also include funding for public-health communication. At the time of writing, there is no single, easy-to- find dashboard providing updated figures for cases and deaths.
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